Ward Churchill’s fight to win back his job at the University of Colorado gained momentum Tuesday when the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal.

“It’s very good news for the First Amendment, academic freedom and Ward Churchill,” said his lawyer, David Lane.

The case has not yet been placed on the docket.

Then-ethnic-studies professor Chur chill was fired in 2007 after a protracted dispute that began with an essay in which he called some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who was a main organizer of the Holocaust.

CU said his remarks were protected by the First Amendment, but a subsequent investigation found that he had plagiarized some of his other writings, and he was fired for academic misconduct.

Churchill filed a civil lawsuit against the university. A Denver jury awarded him $1, finding that his First Amendment rights were violated during the investigation, but Denver District Judge Larry Naves set aside the verdict.

“Every judge who has heard the case thus far found that the university acted appropriately when we terminated him,” said CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue. “We believe the (state) Supreme Court will do the same.”

The court will consider three issues:

• Whether a university’s investigation into a professor’s writings, which results in termination, is a violation of the First Amendment.

• Whether university regents can make judgments that are comparable to those of judges, who receive immunity from lawsuits.

• Whether Churchill can win his job back even if the regents are given immunity.

Herbert Fenster, a former University of Pennsylvania trustee, is a Denver lawyer at McKenna, Long & Al dridge, which has represented many colleges and universities, including the regents of the University of California and the trustees of Stanford University.

“In those cases, I took a very different position than the one taken in this case,” he said. “I didn’t believe that a tenured professor at a public or private university had absolute free-speech rights.”

Those rights were circumscribed, he said, by a professor’s obligation to meet minimum professional standards of credibility.

“Within the area of his expertise, he could not make outrageous remarks that he and his peers would think untrue or improper,” Fenster said. “From my perspective, it never should have been an absolute First Amendment case.”

But Lane said the case is critical to First Amendment rights for academics.

“It’s clearly a point of principle,” he said of Churchill’s fight.

Further, he said Churchill is ready and willing to return to his $96,400-per-year job.

“Just because the regents of (CU) don’t respect the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mean it’s an evil institution,” Lane said.

In his 2009 ruling, Naves wrote that mutual hostility between the university and Chur chill leaves “only a minuscule possibility that his return to the university will be amicable and productive.”

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.

Wednesday morning two independent research teams, one based in the Netherlands and the other in California, reported that the deluge from Hurricane Harvey was significantly heavier than it would have been before the era of human-caused global warming.

Denver’s newest skyscraper will be home to one of the city’s most recognizable home-grown business by the end of next year. Chipotle is moving its 450 downtown corporate staff into the 1144 Fifteenth tower by the end of 2018.